Top 30 Oli Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is too short for unreality and you don’t owe anybody anything – especially your time, energy, and attention.”

— Oli Anderson

2. “Familiarity breeds contempt, for others at first, but then inwardly, contempt towards ourselves.”

— Oli Anderson

3. “Your Shadow is all of the things, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, that you’ve denied about yourself and hidden beneath the surface of the mask you forgot that you’re wearing.”

— Oli Anderson

4. “The Ego is the ‘thing’ that you’ve created to keep hiding from your Shadow, convinced that it’s all the ‘light’ or ‘good’ things about you – when in reality, the ego is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ because it’s totally unreal.”

— Oli Anderson

5. “See yourself as a long-term work in progress, not a short-term project of preservation.”

— Oli Anderson

6. “Debate is an attempt to cling to the illusion of control provided by a point of view designed to keep the ego in place; dialogue is an attempt to dance with the unknown at the risk of losing what we think we know.”

— Oli Anderson

7. “Self-destruction and self-sabotage are often just the start of the self-resurrection process.”

— Oli Anderson

8. “If you don’t accept yourself, you can’t transcend yourself and the world: first, you need to increase your awareness, then you need to accept what you learn, then you need to take action.”

— Oli Anderson

9. “The first step to empathy and compassion is realising the similarities between yourself and those that are suffering; the first step to forgiveness is realising that we’re all human and we all share the same capacity for fallibility and foible; the first step to growth is to recognise the value of things that are outside your current mental frameworks so that you can grow into them.”

— Oli Anderson

10. “Real always works.”

— Oli Anderson

11. “The human condition is essentially the conflict between the human need for control and a universe that provides little if any of it. Once we accept this and get into the flow of life, we are free and, paradoxically, able to get better results.”

— Oli Anderson

12. “It is essential to our health and happiness that we dedicate ourselves to some kind of mission or purpose that transcends the mundane hustle and bustle of daily living.”

— Oli Anderson

13. “Dialogue isn’t a competition to be the smartest or the most correct person in the room; it is a collaboration to find the truth.”

— Oli Anderson

14. “What you’re looking for is ‘inside’ you but you can only reclaim it by shattering the mirror on which it reflects itself back at you. When the mirror is shattered, the shards reveal your Real Face.”

— Oli Anderson

15. “Having problems doesn’t make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control.”

— Oli Anderson

16. “Don’t cling to your self-concept purely because your will demands it. Demand that your environment aligns as much as possible and change what you must about yourself when the outer world can’t be changed. Mental health is about mental fluidity, mental illness stems in rigidity.”

— Oli Anderson

17. “Your Ego and your Shadow are in constant conflict.”

— Oli Anderson

18. “This world is your world but that doesn’t mean you can always stop it from burning.”

— Oli Anderson

19. “Whether you know it or you don’t, whether you accept it or not, everything you do is about the reclamation of your own ‘soul’.”

— Oli Anderson

20. “One of the most human things that you can do is reach out for the stars knowing that you might not ever touch them; we are all perfectly imperfect, but to live knowing so is to be a fulfilled human being.”

— Oli Anderson

21. “To engage in dialogue is to serve others via whatever is real inside you; to engage in debate is to ultimately serve the illusions of your ego.”

— Oli Anderson

22. “Whenever we find ourselves stuck, whenever we find ourselves lost or confused by the chaos of the world, we can be sure that the only way to free ourselves is to take action of some kind. Action is the only thing that ever changes anything and in a world that ever changes, it is the best way to keep ourselves in the flow of the world unfolding.”

— Oli Anderson

23. “We have to accept that much of reality is ineffable and so to understand it we can’t rely on words alone.”

— Oli Anderson

24. “Life is for those that deserve it. Those kings amongst men who can climb out of barrels and will dare to break through glass walls and to transcend all of this whatever it is, these eyes to the ground, this pretence, acting only as is expected and never as is intended. We have been told what is acceptable in what situation and so we take heed. This is not living. In the real world, in nature, there is no need to pretend. There is no place for it.”

— Oli Anderson

25. “Dialogue can help you find out if you’ve been brainwashed or not.”

— Oli Anderson

26. “When one dream dies we replace it with another.”

— Oli Anderson

27. “Most arguments are about programming; most resolutions are reached through a process of unlearning then relearning.”

— Oli Anderson

28. “Practicing dialogue helps you to cultivate a realness that allows you to face reality on its own terms, not just the terms you’d like it to have in order to remain in your comfort zone.”

— Oli Anderson

29. “The final lesson is that ‘reality’ is always the way to go and that acceptance is the only way to get there.”

— Oli Anderson

30. “If humans created it then it is the product of a choice that somebody made. And if it was chosen it can be changed.”

— Oli Anderson

31. “Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.”

— Oli Anderson

32. “Only ever doing what feels comfortable is a form of suicide.”

— Oli Anderson

33. “God’ is whatever is the next obvious step towards wholeness in yourself and your life; ‘Ego’ is whatever within you stops you taking it.”

— Oli Anderson

34. “Refuse to waste time trying to convince yourself that you don’t have time, when you could be using that time to actually ‘do’ it.”

— Oli Anderson